Why Class Matters

After the last election, Democratic Party functionaries were puzzled that voters-- usually attuned closely to the economy-- failed to show proper appreciation for the Biden economic miracle. They cited the billions in federal money flowing toward economic growth; they repeated aggregate growth figures more robust than other advanced economies; they showed that consumer spending continued to show surprising vigor; they noted that aggregate incomes grew faster than inflation; and they reminded us of the often-mentioned markers of rising stock market and housing values.

Baffled by the voters who shunned Bidenomics and complained about the economy, Democratic Party pundits are convinced that voters are simply ignorant of the facts.

Today, perhaps more than ever, the failure to recognize social-class divisions produces ill-informed, arrogant judgments like those prominent within Democratic Party circles. While aggregate numbers may tell one story, they fail to tell the story of the economic well-being of the classes and strata that make up the aggregate, even the by-far-largest segment of that aggregate. Could it be that Biden’s economic victory was a victory for the wealthiest, the most generously compensated among the US population, while leaving the majority of US citizens (and voters) in the rear-view mirror?

The answer is an unequivocal ‘yes.’

And the answer comes, not from a left-leaning think tank, but from Federal Reserve data by way of Moody’s Analytics and summarized in The Wall Street Journal.

As reported in the WSJ, the top 10% of “earners” -- those households reporting $250,000 in income or more-- are responsible for 49.7% of consumer spending. In other words, nearly half of all consumer spending is accounted for by those in the top 10% of all those reporting their incomes. This is the largest share for this elite segment since the Federal Reserve began tracking in 1989. In just three decades, the top 10%'s portion has increased from over a third to nearly half of all consumer spending.

According to the WSJ:

Taken together, well-off people have increased their spending far beyond inflation, while everyone else hasn’t. The bottom 80% of earners spent 25% more than they did four years earlier, barely outpacing price increases of 21% over that period. The top 10% spent 58% more…

Between September 2023 and September 2024, the high earners increased their spending by 12%. Spending by working-class and middle-class households, meanwhile, dropped over the same period.

Democratic Party consultant James Carville likes to say “it's the economy, stupid!” that decides US elections. If he is right, the celebration of Bidenomics was widely off the mark. During the Biden years, for 80% of US voters, their economy was stagnant, at best. In that light, the election results are far more understandable as reflective of pocketbook issues.

US economic growth is often portrayed by the major media as driven by household consumption (around two-thirds of gross US economic activity comes from household consumption). However, these reports are deceptive if they fail to acknowledge that nearly all of the consumption growth impacting GDP growth comes from the wealthiest 10% of the population. Arguably, so-called luxury spending is the driving force behind economic growth in the US in our time.

Thus, the widely heralded mantra of capitalist apologists that “a rising tide lifts all boats” has it backwards. In fact, the privileged 10% of all boats that rise constitute the tide.

Economy 101 preaches that working people spend nearly all that they make (or need to borrow more to make ends meet). That same conventional wisdom tells us that the rich reinvest or save most of their earnings. Both may be and are true, though inequality of income has grown so much that the richest 10% can save and reinvest while spending lavishly and conspicuously.

Since late 2021, the excess savings of the bottom 90% has dropped from about $1.1 trillion dollars to $300 billion at the end of 2024. In roughly the same period, the uppermost 10% has maintained an excess savings of about $1.3-1.4 trillion, according to Moody’s Analytics. Clearly, the bottom 90% was forced to draw down savings over the last four years in order to get by. It is important to notice that the concept of the “bottom 90%” masks the reality that each successive lower decile of household income below the top 10% has fewer means and lesser savings to meet a reasonably adequate standard of living. In short, the pain induced by a system maintaining such vast income inequality grows more acute as the level of income declines.

While not a proper class analysis of US society (not to be expected from official government statistics), the Federal Reserve data, as interpreted by Moody’s Analytics, provides a material basis for understanding the most recent US election.[i] As opposed to dire conclusions of a fascist mentality sweeping the country or wild celebrations of the revival of a mythical conservative past, the economic unraveling of the last period fed the electorate's profound thirst for change, any change.

In the wake of a deep economic collapse in the first decade of a new century-- a crisis unlike any seen for generations-- US voters turned, at that time, to a fresh-faced Democrat promising change. He won voters with his earnest, unbounded hope. He produced little change, but more of the same blindness to inequality.

Now, in the wake of the economic stagnation and hardship for the majority 90% struggling through the Biden years, another snake oil salesman returns, capturing one of the two decadent parties with another message of change-- Make America Great Again.

And again, voters act out of desperation.

Don’t blame the voters, blame the bankrupt two-party system and the economic system dominated by and for the rich and powerful.

Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com

[1] A proper economic class analysis will not evoke income or wealth-- simply contingent, quantified signifiers of inequality-- but qualitative indicators of socio-economic position or status. For Marxists, class is defined by an agent's function within a particular mode of production with regard to the economic relation of exploitation. Thus, under capitalism, class is a division between exploiters-- capitalists-- and the exploited-- workers. One class commands the means of production, the other class sells the former its labor power.

Of course, there are strata within and outside of the two classes: the haute and petit bourgeoisie, the ‘labor aristocracy,’ industrial workers, lumpen-proletariat, etc.

In general, income and wealth inequality are a result of class division and exploitation under capitalism and not its cause.

A Return to Basics: Rasmus, the “Neoliberal” Turn, and Exploitation

Instead of the conservative motto, 'A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!' they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: 'Abolition of the wage system!' Karl Marx, Value, Price, and Profit

Today, the point that Marx made in his 1865 address to the First International Working Men’s Association is largely lost on the trade unions and even with many self-styled Marxists. The distinction between the goal of “a fair day's wage” and the goal of eliminating exploitation-- the wage system embedded in capitalism-- is lost before a common, but unfocused revulsion to the exploding growth of inequality. It is one thing to deplore the growth of inequality, it is quite another to establish what would replace the logic of unfettered accumulation.

Marx offered no guidelines for a “fair wage”. Indeed, his analysis of capitalism made no significant use of the concept of fairness. Instead, he made the concept of exploitation central to his political economy. He used the concept in two ways: First, he employed “exploitation” in the popular sense of “taking advantage of” -- the sense that the capitalist takes advantage of the worker. “Exploitation of man by man” was a nascent concept, arriving in discourse with the expansion of mass industrial employment and borrowed from an earlier, morally-neutral usage regarding the exploitation of non-humans. Its etymology, in that sense, arises in the late eighteenth century.

Marx also uses the word in a more rigorous sense: as a description of the interaction of the worker and the capitalist in the process of commodity production. Even more rigorously, it appears in political economic tracts like Capital as a ratio between the axiomatic concepts of surplus value and variable capital.

As a worker-friendly concept, exploitation is most readily grasped by workers in the basic industries, especially in extractive and raw-material industries. Historically, an early twentieth century coal miner-- bringing the tools of extraction with him, responsible for his own safety while risking a more likely death than a war-time soldier, and accepting the “privilege” of going into a cold, damp hole to dig coal for someone else’s profit-- intuitively understood exploitation. A reflective miner would recoil from the fact that ownership of a property could somehow-- apart from any other consideration-- confer to someone the right to profit from a commodity that someone else had faced mortal danger to extract from the earth. What is a “fair day’s wage” in such a circumstance?

Organically, from its intuitive understanding by workers, and theoretically, from class-partisan intellectuals like Marx and Engels, as well as their rivals like Bakunin, exploitation became the central idea behind anti-capitalism and socialism.

Today, most workers’ connection to the exploitation relation appears far removed from the direct relation of a coal miner to the coal face and to the owner of the coal mine. The immediacy of labor and labor’s product in extraction is often of many removes in service-sector or white-collar jobs. Moreover, the division of labor blurs the contribution of the individual’s efforts to the final product.

Well into the twentieth century, “labor exploitation” fell out of the lexicon of the left, especially in the more advanced capitalist countries, where Marx thought that it would be of most use. Left thinkers, as well as Marxists, rightly attended to the colonial question, focusing on the struggle for independence and sovereignty; they were discouraged by the tendency for class-collaboration in many leading working-class organizations; Communist Parties correctly felt a primary duty to defend the gains of the socialist and socialist-oriented countries; and the fight for peace was always a paramount concern.

Exploitation was attacked from the academy. The Humanist “Marxist” school trivialized the exploitation nexus to a species of the broad, amorphous concept of alienation. The Analytical “Marxist” school congratulated itself by proving that given an inequality of assets, a community of exchange-oriented actors would produce and reproduce inequality of assets, a proof altogether irrelevant to the concept of exploitation, which the school promised to clarify. Both schools influenced a retreat from Marxism in the university, followed by a stampede after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Liberal and social-democratic theory revisits the “fair day's wage” with the explosion of income inequality and wealth inequality of the last decades of the twentieth century that was too impossible to ignore. But what is a “fair wage”? What level of income or wealth distribution is just, fair, socially responsible, or socially beneficial? The questions are largely unanswerable, if not incoherent. 

Thanks to the empirical, long-term study of inequality shared in Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century, we learn that capitalism’s historical tendency has been to always produce and reproduce income and wealth inequality, a conclusion sobering to those who hope to refashion capitalism into an egalitarian system and making a “fair wage” even more elusive. Piketty’s work offers no clue to what could constitute a “fair wage.”

Others point to the productivity-pay gap that emerged in the 1970s, where wage growth and productivity took entirely different courses at the expense of wage gains. Researchers who perceptively point to this gap as contributing to the growth of inequality often harken back to the immediate postwar era, when productivity growth and wage growth were somewhat in step, when the gains of productivity were “shared” between capital and labor. But what is magical about sharing? Why shouldn't labor get 75% or 85% of the gain? Or all of the gain? Is maintaining existing inequalities the optimal social goal for the working class?

Where the concept of a “fair wage” offers more questions than answers, Marx’s concept of exploitation suggests a uniquely coherent and direct answer to the persistent and intensifying growth of income and wealth: eliminate labor exploitation! Abolish the wage system!

Thus, the return to the discussion of exploitation is urgent. And that is why a serious and clarifying account of exploitation today is so welcome.

*****

Jack Rasmus takes a step toward that end in a carefully argued, important paper, Labor Exploitation in the Era of the Neoliberal Policy Regime. I have followed Rasmus’s work for many years, especially admiring his respect for the tool of historical inquiry and his scrupulous research, interpretation, and careful use of “official” data. On the other hand, I thought that his work failed to fully consider the Marxist tradition, unduly drawn to engaging with the pettifoggery of academic “Marxists.”

However, his new work proves that assessment to be mistaken. Indeed, his latest work reflects an admirable reading of Marx’s political economy and offers an important tool in the struggle to end the wage system.

Rasmus understands that we are in a distinct era of capitalism, forced by the failure of the prior “policy regime” and typified by several features: intensified global penetration of capital and trade expansion (“globalization”), a massively growing role for financial innovation and notional profits (“financialization”), and most significantly, the restoration and expansion of the rate of profit (“the intensification of labor exploitation in both Absolute and Relative value terms that has occurred from the 1980s to the present”). 

It should be noted that Rasmus does not discuss why a new “policy regime” became necessary in the 1970s. Both the stagflation that proved intractable to the reigning Keynesian paradigm and the attack on the US profit rate by foreign competition (see Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence, NLR, 229) necessitated a sea change in the direction of capitalism.

I might add that while so-called globalization was an important feature of “the neoliberal policy regime,” the 2007-2009 economic crisis has diminished the growth of global trade. Indeed, its decline has fostered the rise of economic nationalism, the latest wrinkle on the “neoliberal policy regime.”

Rasmus carefully and methodically documents and explicates the intensification of labor exploitation in commodity production (what he calls “primary exploitation”) over the last fifty years. He recognizes the important and growing role of the state in enabling this intensification. This is, of course, the process that Lenin foresaw with the fusing of the state and monopoly capitalism-- a process associated in Marxist-Leninist theory with the rise of state-monopoly capitalism. Today’s advanced capitalist states fully embrace the goal of defending and advancing the profitability (‘health’) of monopoly corporations (‘a rising tide lifts all boats’), including intensifying labor exploitation.

Just how that intensification is accomplished is the subject of Rasmus’s paper.

*****

Rasmus is aware that Marx expressed the exploitation nexus in terms of labor value. He avoids the scholasticism that side-tracks academically trained economists who obsess over the price/value relationship-- the so-called transformation problem. Value-- specifically a labor theory of value -- is central to Marx because it explains how commodities can command different, non-arbitrary exchange values and how the different proportionalities between the exchange values of commodities are determined. That is the problem Marx sets forth in the first pages of Capital, and value-- as embodied labor-- is the answer that he gives.

Using labor value as his theoretical primitive enables Rasmus to discuss exploitation in Marx’s framework of absolute and relative surplus value-- exploitation by extending the working day or intensifying the production process. While Rasmus offers a persuasive argument that his use of “official” data couched in prices can legitimately be translated into values, it is unnecessary for his thesis. The relations are preserved because the proportionalities are, in general, preserved. It is a reasonable and adequate assumption that prices and values run in parallel, though a weaker claim than that prices can be derived from values.

Methodological considerations aside, Rasmus sets out to show-- and succeeds in showing-- that exploitation has accelerated in the “neoliberal” era in terms of both relative and absolute surplus value:

Capitalism’s Neoliberal era has witnessed a significant intensification and expansion of total exploitation compared to the pre-Neoliberal era. Under Neoliberal Capitalism both the workday (Absolute Surplus Value extraction) has been extended while, at the same time, the productivity of labor has greatly increased (Relative Surplus Value extraction) in terms of both the intensity and the mass of relative surplus value extracted.

Regarding Absolute Surplus Value, he demonstrates: 

[I]t is true the work day was reduced during the first two thirds of the 20th century—by strong unions, union contract terms, and to some extent from government disincentives to extend the work day as a result of the passage of wages and hours legislation. But that trend and scenario toward a shorter work day was halted and rolled back starting in the late 1970s and the neoliberal era. The length of the Work Day has risen—not continued to decline—for full time workers under the Neoliberal Economic Regime.

Through a careful combing and analysis of government data, as well as original arguments, Rasmus shows how capital has succeeded in extending the workday. His discussion of changes in mandatory overtime, in temporary employment, in involuntary part-time employment, in paid leave, in changing work culture, in job classifications, in work from home, internships, and other practices form a persuasive argument for the existence of a trend of the lengthening of the average workday. 

Similarly, Relative Labor Exploitation has accelerated in the “Neoliberal” era, according to Rasmus:

Rising productivity is a key marker for growing exploitation of Labor. If real wages have not risen since the late 1970s but productivity has—and has risen at an even faster rate in recent decades—then the value reflected in business revenues and profits of the increased output from that productivity has accrued almost totally to Capital.

In this regard, the numbers are widely recognized and non-controversial. Labor productivity has grown significantly, while wages have essentially stagnated. Rasmus tells us that it is even worse than it looks:

So, wages have risen only about one-sixth of the productivity increase.  But perhaps only half of that total 13% real hourly wage increase went to the top 5% of the production & nonsupervisory worker group, according to EPI 10 (Economic Policy Institute, February 2020). That means for the median wage production worker, the share of productivity gain was likely 10% or less. The median wage and below production worker consequently received a very small share in wages from productivity over the forty years since 1979. It virtually all accrued to Capital…

According to the US Labor Department, there were 106 million production & nonsupervisory workers at year end 2019—out of the approximately 150 million total nonfarm labor force at that time. Had they entered the labor force around 1982-84, they would have experienced no real wage increase over the four decades.

Rasmus notes that the US maintained the same share of global manufacturing production through the first two decades of the twenty-first century, but doing it with six million fewer workers. This, of course, meant a rising rate of exploitation and a greater share of surplus value for the capitalists. Though the job losses struck especially hard at an important section of the manufacturing working class relegated to unemployment, the remaining workers lost further from concessionary bargaining promoted by a business-union leadership. Thus, they were unable to secure any of the gains accrued by rising productivity. They experienced a higher rate of exploitation.

*****

Demonstrating that labor exploitation has increased in the last 45-50 years in terms of absolute and relative surplus value does not, according to Rasmus, close the book on labor exploitation. Drawing on a suggestive quote in Volume III of Capital, he develops an original theory of “secondary exploitation.” Marx writes:

That the working-class is also swindled in this form [usury, commerce], and to an enormous extent, is self-evident… This is secondary exploitation, which runs parallel to the primary exploitation taking place in the production process itself. Capital, Volume III, p. 609 

Rasmus explains secondary exploitation this way: “Secondary Exploitation (SE) is not a question of value being created in exchange relations. It’s about capitalists reclaiming part of what they paid initially in wages. It’s about how capitalists maximize Total Exploitation by manipulating exchange relations as well as production relations.” 

To be clear, Marx is not using the technical sense of “exploitation” here, but the popular sense. However, the fact that the worker has “earned” a measure of value and that capitalists can wrest some of it away in various ways is exploitation and important and worthy of study. 

Here, however, Rasmus digresses, reverting back to the price form in his explanation of secondary exploitation. He seems to assume, without elaboration, that systemic “taking advantage of workers” outside of the production process must be explained in terms of prices and not values. He also seems to believe that all means of secondary exploitation must be within the exchange nexus. And he seems to believe that all secondary exploitation must be systemic. It is not clear why these assumptions should be made.

These methodological questions, however, bear little relevance to his fresh and original insights on secondary exploitation. Rasmus presents five mechanisms for capital to “claw back” from the working people the variable capital captured by the class in the value-producing process: credit, monopolistic price gouging, wage theft, deferred or social wages, and taxes. Importantly, Rasmus connects much of this exploitation to the active intervention of the state on behalf of capital.

Credit: Allowing workers to acquire commodities through deferred payment is not a sympathetic act by the capitalist, but a method of furthering accumulation in an environment where demand is restricted by the inequalities of income and wealth. The capitalist extracts additional value from the worker through interest charges. Additional value is “swindled” from the worker through the credit mechanism. Rasmus points out that interest-bearing loans to working people have expanded from $10 trillion-plus in 2013 to $17 trillion-plus in 2024, with dramatically higher interest rates in the last few years.

Monopolistic price gouging: Rasmus is fully aware that when prices go up, they are the result of decisions by capitalists to secure more revenue-- that action is not to benefit society, not to help the workers, but to secure more for investors. Insofar as they succeed, their gains are at the expense of workers-- a form of secondary exploitation.

Our current run of inflation is the result of a cycle of price increases to capture more of the consumers’ (in the end, the workers’) value and to catch up with competitors. But the impression must not be left unchallenged that this price gouging is painlessly left to the capitalist at his or her whim or that it is without risk. The impression must not be left, as it was in the 1960s with Sweezy/Baran, Gillman, and others, that monopoly concentration meant a sharp decline in the power of competition to retard and even thwart monopoly power to do as it liked. That lesson was sharply brought home in the 1970s with humbling of the US big three automakers and the US electronics industry. Monopoly and competition play a dialectical role in disciplining price behavior around labor values.

Wage theft: While theft is not exploitation, when it is common, frequent, and rarely sanctioned, it resembles exploitation more than theft! Rasmus provides an impressible list of common ruses-- “The methods [of wage theft] have included capitalists not paying the required minimum wage; not paying overtime wage rates as provided in Federal and state laws; not paying workers for the actual hours they work; paying them by the day or job instead of by the hour; forcing workers to pay their managers for a job; supervisors stealing workers’ cash tips; making illegal deductions from workers’ paychecks; deducting their pay for breaks they didn’t take or for damages to company goods; supervisors arranging pay ‘kickbacks’ for themselves from workers’ pay; firing workers and not paying them for their last day worked; failing to give proper 60-day notice of a plant closing and then not paying workers as required by law; denying workers access to guaranteed benefits like workers’ compensation when injured; refusing to make contributions to pension and health plans on behalf of workers and then pocketing the savings; and, not least, general payroll fraud.”

Deferred or Social wages: Rasmus shows how the government mechanisms that are meant to socially meet needs are skewed to draw more from workers proportionally while benefiting them less proportionally. He has in mind retirement, health care, and welfare programs that politicians persistently demand more sacrifices from working people to fund, while restricting their ability to draw the benefits through various tests of eligibility.

Taxes: Rasmus reminds us that the dominant political forces espousing the “Neoliberal policy regime” have dramatically increased the tax burden on workers:

Since the advent of Neoliberalism, the total tax burden has shifted from capitalists, their corporations, businesses, and investors to working class families.

In the post-World War II era the payroll tax has more than doubled as a share of total federal tax revenues, to around 45% by 2020. During the same period, the share of taxes paid by corporations has fallen from more than 20% to less than 10%. The federal individual income tax as a percent of total federal government revenues has remained around 40-45%. However, within that 40-45%, another shift in the burden has been occurring—from capital incomes to earned wage incomes…

Not just Trump, but every president since 2001 the US capitalist State has been engaged in a massive tax cutting program mostly benefiting capital incomes. The total tax cuts have amounted to at least $17 trillion since 2001: Starting with George W. Bush’s 2001-03 tax cuts which cut taxes $3.8 trillion (80% of which accrued to Capital incomes), through Obama’s 2009 tax cuts and his extension of Bush’s cuts in 2008 for another two years and again for another 10 years in 2013 (all of which cost another $6 trillion), through Trump’s massive 2017 tax cuts that cost $4.5 trillion, and Biden’s 2021-22 tax legislation that added another $2 trillion at minimum—the US Capitalist state has reduced taxes by at least $17 trillion!

Reducing capital’s taxes, as a proportion of tax revenue, increases future national obligations-- national debt-- that will ultimately be paid by working-class taxes. Or, if that proves unfeasible, it will be met by a reduction of social spending, which reduces social benefits for workers. Either way, the working class faces secondary exploitation through ruling-class tax policy.

Interestingly, Rasmus acknowledges that the state plays a big role in what he deems “secondary exploitation.” Yet, he also suggests that the proper province of secondary exploitation is in the bounds of exchange relations. This seeming anomaly can be avoided if we understand the increasing role of the state in engaging, broadly speaking, in the arena of exchange, as well as regulation. It is precisely this profound and broad engagement that many twentieth-century Marxists explained as state-monopoly capitalism.

*****

Jack Rasmus’s contribution is most welcome because it argues that returning to the fundamentals-- the concept of exploitation-- can be a fruitful way of looking at contemporary capitalism. It establishes a firm material base for an anti-capitalist politics that addresses the interests of working people as a class, the broadest of classes. 

Further, the theory of exploitation unites people as workers, but allows for the various ways and degrees of their exploitation. And it links the material interests of the protagonists in the class struggle to the many forms of social oppression and their contradictory interests in promoting or ending those oppressions: the capitalist sows oppressive divisions to gain exploitative advantage; the worker disavows oppressive divisions to achieve the unity necessary to defeat exploitation. That is, exploitation motivates the capitalist to divide people around nationality, race, sex, culture, social practices, and language. Ending exploitation motivates the worker to refuse these divisions.

In an age where capitalism owns a decided, powerful advantage because of the splintering of the left into numerous causes and where capitalism elevates individual identity to a place superseding class, the common goal of eliminating exploitation is a powerful unifying force.

Today’s left has too often interpreted anti-imperialism as simply the struggle for national sovereignty, rather than through the lens of exploitation. Consequently, the dynamics of class struggle within national borders is often missed. 

Of course, for Lenin and his followers, an advanced stage of capitalism-- monopoly capitalism-- was the life form of imperialism. And its beating heart was exploitation.

The vital tool that Marx, Engels, and Lenin brought to the struggle for workers’ emancipation was the theory of exploitation. 

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Never to be Forgotten: A Life too Short

January 12 marked 60 years since the death of Lorraine Hansberry at the age of thirty-four. Hansberry was a brilliant intellectual and cultural worker who would earn the begrudging respect of the highest cultural gatekeepers, despite her activism in Communist and anti-racist circles. At a time in the early post-war period when lynching was commonplace and anti-Communism was in full crescendo, it was rare for anyone to risk membership or association, especially for a young African American from a prominent family on Chicago’s South Side. Most of her contemporaries were running away from Communism as fast as their feet would take them.

Her Communist activism on the Wisconsin-Madison campus coincided with her full support of the 1948 Henry Wallace Progressive Party campaign. Her commitment took her to New York, where she worked on Freedom, a newspaper created and contributed to by Black Communists and leftists, including Paul Robeson, W.E.B. DuBois, Louis Burnham, John Oliver Killens, Lloyd Brown, and others (Freedom was the forerunner to Freedomways, an equally leftist publication brought to life in the civil rights era). That Hansberry enthusiastically jumped into this cauldron of ostracized and blacklisted African American intellectuals in 1951 at the age of 21 and at the height of Cold War hysteria is a tribute to both her courage and her integrity.

In 1957, Hansberry wrote the play, A Raisin in the Sun, a masterpiece that came to be associated with her name. Despite the racism of the times and the insularity of the theater, Hansberry became the first African American to have a play produced on Broadway and the youngest playwright to win the prestigious NY Drama Critics Circle Award in 1959.

A Raisin in the Sun (a title taken from a poem by Langston Hughes) profoundly exposes the scars of racial oppression, not in a patronizing or crudely emotion-evoking way, but as social contradictions to be answered through struggle and liberation. It shares with Brecht’s theater universal messages expressed by the unique particulars of real, vulnerable, flawed, but evolving people.

The setting is a working-class Black family living in a poor neighborhood of segregated Chicago’s South Side. The death of the father brings a $10,000 insurance payout and the latent tensions from the possible realization of the family members’ different aspirations. The possibilities of escaping the neighborhood, of a safer, more comfortable home, a better environment for the grandchild, a higher education for the talented daughter, or an entrepreneurial venture for the son all arise. But those possibilities also become threatened by the allure of an attractive, but meager and insufficient payout earned from a life of labor.

The family matron wisely thinks of an investment in a new home as serving the whole family, but in an all-white segregated neighborhood, bringing forth further contradictions. She shares the common working-class dream of gaining a better life. When resisted by family members, she decides, with the wisdom of Job, to divide the settlement, providing a boost to all the dreams. After making a down payment on the house, she entrusted the money to her son, who recklessly gives all of the remaining money to his dishonest business associate.

With the money gone, the play could have become another scolding liberal morality play about victimization, dysfunction, and broken dreams.

Instead, Hansberry has the son meet the white homeowners’ racism, not with supplication but with dignity and defiance. It is not a story of individual redemption, but of finding family pride, familial solidarity, and in a small, but significant way, a commitment to a better world.

The play seamlessly addresses resignation, individualism, class, escapism, racial pride, family dynamics, and, of course, the full scourge of racism.

Because it is not about glass ceilings, elite access, or language policing, it is a good reminder today of the continuing oppression of Black workers and the poor.

Columbia Pictures remade Raisin into a film in 1961, retaining Hansberry as the screenwriter and winning many accolades. The American Film Institute counts the film version as one of their top 100.

Turner Classic Movies showcased the film this past January 20, for Martin Luther King's birthday.

Hansberry’s brilliance was apparent to all who met her. The electric, politically charged singer, Nina Simone-- a close friend of Hansberry-- beautifully performed the song To Be Young, Gifted, and Black as homage to her friend. A recording reached a wide audience in the late 1960s.

Perhaps nothing demonstrates the power and integrity of Hansberry like her 1963 confrontation with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, organized by the celebrated writer, James Baldwin. Baldwin’s prominence prompted Kennedy to arrange an informal meeting with a group of civil rights activists to be assembled by Baldwin. Included in the small group were Jerome Smith, a young CORE freedom rider, who had been beaten and jailed in the South, along with Hansberry.

After hearing Kennedy recounting all of the actions that he claimed the Justice Department had undertaken in the desegregation battles, Smith differed sharply, citing the many times he had seen Federal agents stand by while his cohorts were beaten.

After Kennedy seemed shocked by this audacious response, Hansberry is said to have stated: "You've got a great many very, very accomplished people in this room, Mr. Attorney General. But the only man who should be listened to is that man over there. That is the voice of twenty-two million people" [pointing to Smith].

After Smith maintained that he would rather die than fight a war for the US, Hansberry addressed an appalled Kennedy: "Look, if you can't understand what this young man is saying, then we are without any hope at all because you and your brother are representatives of the best that a White America can offer; and if you are insensitive to this, then there's no alternative except our going in the streets ... and chaos."

After a lecture on how the immigrant Kennedy family suffered poverty, Hansberry walked out.

In a 1979 article in Freedomways, Baldwin warmly remembered that meeting and Hansberry’s contribution: “I must, now… do something which I have never done before: Sketch the famous Bobby Kennedy meeting… I want merely to suggest something of Lorraine Hansberry’s beauty and power on that day; and what the incomprehension that day’s encounter was to cause the nation and presently, the world.”

He recalled the meeting’s close: “The meeting ended with Lorraine standing up. She said, in response to Jerome’s statement concerning the perpetual demolition faced every hour of every day by black men who pay a price literally unspeakable for attempting to protect their women, their children, their homes, or their lives, ‘That is all true, but I am not worried about black men-- who have done splendidly, it seems to me, all things considered.’”

“Then she paused and looked at Bobby Kennedy who, perhaps for the first time, looked at her.”

“‘But I am very worried,’ she said, ‘about the state of the civilization which produced that photograph of the white cop standing on the that Negro woman’s neck in Birmingham’.”

“Then, she smiled. And I am glad that she was not smiling at me. She extended her hand.”

“‘Goodbye, Mr. Attorney General,’ she said and walked out of the room.”

Leaving for another meeting, Baldwin remembers: “We passed Lorraine who didn’t see us. She was walking toward Fifth Avenue-- her face twisted, her hands clasped before her belly, eyes darker than any eyes I had ever seen before-- walking in an absolutely private place.

I knew I couldn’t call her.

Our car drove on; we passed her.

And then, we heard the thunder.”

Her commitment-- her complete commitment to social justice-- never ebbed, even facing her mortality. In the spring of 1964, months before her death of pancreatic cancer, she literally rose from a hospital bed to speak at a fundraiser for Monthly Review. She concluded:

As we all know, there is something which we might call the “civil rights game” going on in this country, and it is being played right now in Washington. It is a game in which individuals, and indeed whole classes of individuals, who are in every way imaginable committed to the perpetuation of the oppression of Negroes, pretend for a whole variety of fashionable reasons that they are not. A portion of those who play this game go so far as to pretend that not only are they against the present condition of Negroes but they would like to alter that condition for the better; and according to the rules of the game, they are designated by their co-players as civil rights champions and, depending on what is happening on a given day, they debate with one another on the best methods of stalling Negro demands for equality while appearing to be laboring on behalf of Negro equality. Naturally whenever Negroes assert that their situation is intolerable, these game-players point to the game which is going on and say that if those Negroes do not shut up they will stop playing altogether and reveal their true sentiments with regard to Negro freedom—which of course would be one of the healthiest things that could happen to this not-so-healthy country.

That is why I have come here this evening to celebrate with you the recognition of the fact that there is only one place from which that desperately needed pressure on the game is going to come when all is said and done. It’s going to come from 20 million discontented black people who, however, must be led by a new and presently developing young Negro leadership—a leadership which must absolutely, if the present Negro revolt is to turn into a revolution, become sophisticated in the most advanced ideas abroad in the world, a leadership which will have had exposure to the great ideas and movements of our time, a Negro leadership which can throw off the blindness of parochialism and bathe the aspirations of the Negro people in the realism of the twentieth century, a leadership which has no illusion about the nature of our oppression and will no longer hesitate to condemn, not only the results of that oppression, but also the true and inescapable cause of it—which of course is the present organization of American society. Monthly Review, 2015, Volume 67, Issue 01 (May)

A friend since her days at Freedom, the esteemed writer John Oliver Killens recalls: “To me, Lorraine Hansberry was a one-woman literary warrior for change-- qualitative and fundamental change.” He adds: “In my view, Lorraine was a Black nationalist with a socialist perspective… Have not all the revolutions of the 20th century been about national liberation? And haven’t they all been socialist revolutions-- Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam?”

But Hansberry was also an internationalist, he elaborates: “As with Robeson and Malcolm, her nationalism had an internationalist context that is reflected by one of her African characters in Les Blancs [her last play]. Tshembe tells the white man, Charles Morris:

I shall be honest with you, Mr. Morris. I do not ‘hate’ all white men-- but I desperately wish I did. It would make everything infinitely easier! But I am afraid that, among other things, I have seen the slums of Liverpool and Dublin and the caves of Naples. I have seen Dachau and Anne Frank’s attic in Amsterdam. I have seen too many raw-knuckled Frenchmen coming out of the metro at dawn and too many pop-eyed Italian children to believe that those who raided Africa for three centuries ever ‘loved’ the white race either."

Killens sums up Lorraine Hansberry, as if anyone could really sum up such a brilliant giant among Lilliputians:

Lorraine Hansberry was an extraordinarily articulate young black woman, committed to the struggle and very fast on the draw. Indeed, literarily and intellectually, she was one of the fastest guns in the East-- and her gun was for revolution and change. She was a humanist; she was anti-slavery (meaning she was anti-capitalist). The pity of it, and the loss to us, are that she was with us for so terribly short of a period. Who knows to what heights this courageous falcon might have soared? (Freedomways, fourth quarter, 1979)

A great loss, not to be forgotten…

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Essential Reading for the New Year

If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, Vincent Bevins and Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade, Jeff Schuhrke were maybe the two most important books that I read this past year. I have read many good books, many well written books, many timely books, but these were arguably the two most important books. 

They are important because they attempt to tackle questions that are neglected or only superficially discussed on the political left. They are most important because they surface popular assumptions that are among the greatest obstacles to the success of any authentically left project: spontaneity as an organizational philosophy and anti-Communism as political orthodoxy.

Recommended reviews of both books can be found on Marxism-Leninism Today here and here.  

Bevins’ book highlights the failure of impressive mass risings that rocked several countries and their ruling classes in the twenty-first century. He chronicles the objective conditions that inspired people to rise in opposition and in great numbers; he confirms the breadth and depth of the movements that arose; and he demonstrates how the movements fell far short of their goals, even resulting in setbacks.

In the cases Bevins studies, though the movements met with resistance, they melted away far before any final reckoning with that resistance. In his post-mortem-- based on many interviews with leaders, participants, and activists-- he concluded that a strong commitment to spontaneity, a rigid rejection of hierarchies, and a naive concept of participatory democracy hindered moving from demonstrations to successful social change, not to mention, revolutions. 

It is this prominence of neo-anarchism or radical democracy-- two ideologies that collapse, in practice, into one-- that doomed the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, and many other promising movements that succeeded in bringing millions into action, but left the stage with little gain. 

While Bevins insists that he is only a journalist-- a reporter and interpreter of findings-- he strongly suggests that structure and leadership were the missing elements from mass struggles of this century. One cannot help but sense that he has something akin to a Leninist organizational model in mind, without an explicit endorsement. And why not? After all, weren’t highly organized, vision-driven, often worker-led parties the most formidable, the most successful movements for change, for revolution in the last century? 

Today’s tragedy is that a handful of sentences describing a grievous injustice on social media can bring mighty masses to the streets, but the reigning simplistic ideology of spontaneous, undirected, unfocussed action will go no further. Political demonstrations become exercises in mass therapy-- “performances” of democracy-- rather than goal-directed measures in a larger political program of change.

Of course, these same “spontaneous” risings are also easily hijacked by other political operators with a wholly different agenda, like the infamous color revolutions that have reshaped Eastern Europe and other places in the interest of imperialism. Where there are no organic leaders, where there is no master plan, leaders and direction will likely be supplied from somewhere else.

The student movements of the 1960s codified the idea of participatory democracy-- a decision-making approach that sought to engage everyone equally, renounced the idea of authority, and scorned traditional roles of leadership. But the world is not a college seminar room. Millions of workers and peasants have-- in the past-- deferred the role of leadership to those who have earned it from their dedication and sacrifices. They understood that a revolution itself is the most democratic act of all, breaking the bonds of domination and exploitation and opening the gates to popular rule. 

The overarching focus on democratic procedure-- an obsession of the privileged left-- too often dilutes the commitment to outcomes. The final lap of social change is the replacement of one system with another, the overthrow of one ruling order with another. If, as anarchists and liberals maintain, the democratic procedure is everything, then there is no need to prefigure an outcome. Instead, we can take it on faith that masses-as-a-whole will spontaneously choose the outcome that is best in some imagined, country-wide utopian townhall meeting of the future. 

Unfortunately, history gives us no example of great social change secured by consensus. Nor has a parliament ever handed working people a victory without the pressure of mass militancy. 

Behind the left cult of bourgeois democracy is a deeply ingrained anti-Communism. At the height of the Cold War, Communism, socialism, and even popular frontism came under vigorous attack throughout the capitalist countries and especially in the US. Association with progressive ideas advocated by Communists or the center-left popular front (including the New Deal) risked social isolation, job loss, even jail. Unless accompanied by a conspicuous disclaimer condemning Communism, progressive ideas such as labor rights, social equality, anti-racism, or even mild criticism of capitalism, were cause for ostracization. Few had the integrity to risk the consequences of the Cold War inquisition. Instead, even the most tepid reformism necessarily had to be presented with the tag “democratic” or “free” (to separate itself from Communism), as in “democratic socialism,” “democratic planning,” or “free trade unionism.”

As the worst of the inquisition resided, a “new left” was born that consistently paid homage to the official doctrine of anti-Communism. To the new generation of activists, the problem was not that the capitalist countries needed a radical, even revolutionary makeover, but that they needed their flawed democracies to be reformed, to be more “democratic.” Yes, the institutions were imperfect-- infected with racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, elitism, prejudices of all kinds, militarism, or corruption-- but they were sound and could be fixed with an injection of democracy. 

Fear of redbaiting-- dread of violating the secular religion of anti-Communism-- closed the door to the kind of really radical answers that working people had sought since the dawn of the industrial age. 

Which brings us to Jeff Schurhke’s important book, Blue Collar Empire. 

If the hope of a radically more just, more egalitarian, more humane society lies in the hands of the working class-- and I think it does-- then it cannot be shackled by the dogma of anti-Communism. Yet Schurhke shows that our organized US labor movement-- the AFL-CIO-- has been thoroughly infected with this disease-- a disease that incubated in the business unionism of Samuel Gompers, the American Federation’s founder, spread throughout the years of AFL craft unionism, and killed the promising spark of class-struggle unionism generated by the nascent CIO. 

We learn from Schurhke of the Cold War betrayal of global workers’ solidarity culminating in US labor’s sabotage of The World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU). We are told of the undermining of Communist and left-led unions throughout the world and the disasters that befell foreign workers as a result.

Anti-Communism wedded the AFL-CIO to the CIA stooges Jay Lovestone and Irving Brown, and served as a litmus test for leadership, even participation in the AFL-CIO, effectively vetting the most militant, class-conscious organizers. Through the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), the AFL-CIO collaborated with only the most backward, US-friendly, anti-Communist international union leaders, spreading US dollars to deny workers the right to choose their own way forward.

Schurhke provides us with the most comprehensive account of the insidious AFL-CIO/CIA cooperation since George Morris’s long-out-of-print classic, CIA and American Labor (1967), a book that unfortunately received more attention from the CIA than from most of his contemporary labor historians.

Genuflecting to anti-Communism and mechanically disdaining organizational principles will inevitably cripple left movements today, as they have so often in the past.

For Bevins and Schurhke in their own words, interviews are available from Coming From Left Field: Bevins, Schurhke.

The authors underscore the obstacles to moving beyond the ugly choices currently available, as we enter a new and foreboding year.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com